Tuesday, October 12, 2010

From Creamer Media in Johannesburg, I'm Amy Witherden.

Making headlines:

The Gauteng government's newly released growth and employment strategy will seek to lower the cost and ease of doing business in a province still regarded as South Africa's economic powerhouse, contributing 35% to the national gross domestic product. Special emphasis will be given to network infrastructure investments, such as energy, transport, water and sanitation, as well as information and communication technologies.
Speaking at the Gordon Institute of Business Science on Monday, Economic Development MEC Firoz Cachalia said that the Gauteng Employment Growth and Development Strategy will guide the work of the provincial government until 2014. He added that the provincial 'growth path' was also a contribution to the emerging national growth path.
The provincial authorities believe that strategic economic investments could assist in reducing transaction costs and improve access to services and markets. Further, it could offer a countercyclical employment and growth engine during periods of economic downturn.

Nature is central to the health of businesses that need to incorporate environmental impacts into their risk management. "All financial and economic capital, is derived from natural capital," said United Nations (UN) Environment Programme Finance Initiative cochair Richard Burrett ahead of a major UN conference in Japan that aims to set new targets to combat the accelerating loss of plant and animal species.
"Such an approach should be obvious", said Burrett, yet nature remains essentially invisible to many people and companies, particularly in urban centres. Impacts on nature need to be measured and managed right through the supply chain, and accounting systems needed to be refocused to fully calculate environmental degradation caused by economic development. Failure to do so, means that companies are not measuring the balance sheet and profit and loss accurately, he added.
Companies that "really understand their ecological footprint and can manage it in all aspects of their business, will be better positioned," Burrett says, adding that this is not just about reputational risk but future regulatory risk.

African governments should avoid rushing into big land lease deals with foreign investors, or risk deepening poverty and ramping up social tensions, said United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) senior officer for climate, energy and tenure Paul Mathieu, following a FAO study looking at five countries in sub-Saharan Africa where at least 2,5-million hectares of land have been allocated to large-scale investors since 2004.
These and other deals are raising the hackles of rights groups, which argue that the 'land-grab' trend is reducing access to food for some of the world's poorest people. "Land has become a very visible and hot issue because many actors have realised that it is going to be scarce and a very valuable asset in the future," said Mathieu. "What is important, is to make well-informed choices and not to rush quickly to allocate large tracts of land."
Sub-Saharan African governments eager to attract investment to spur economic activity have signed a flurry of land deals in recent years with resource-hungry investors, including from China, Brazil, and Malaysia.

Also making headlines:

French authorities have arrested a Rwandan accused of leading a rebel group that carried out mass rapes and killings in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
South Africa's Deputy Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister Dr Pieter Mulder warns that the country risks losing its status as Africa's agricultural hub as uncertainty over its land reform programme undermines its competitiveness on the continent.
Guinea's two rival Presidential candidates Celou Dalein Diallo and Alpha Conde have agreed to include each other in government whoever wins the October 24 runoff.
And, the Global Hunger Index reports that 29 countries show alarming levels of hunger and that more than one-billion people were hungry in 2009.

That's a roundup of news making headlines today.